The Heat: China-U.S. technology competition

[Music] the china u.s technology battle what are the stakes and what does the future look like hello i'm arnold knight and this is the heat [Music] china and the united states are now engaged in a major competition in what's being called a high-tech race from smartphones to robots from artificial intelligence to quantum computing to electronic vehicles both countries are moving ahead at speed for a look at how they're doing we begin with this report from cgtn's mark new in california [Music] with high-powered companies like amazon google and facebook the us has long held the top position in artificial intelligence but the author of the digital war winston ma says china and the us are now neck and neck when it comes to the number of leading ai researchers and influential research papers on the topic in china we're talking about 1 billion internet users every day they're leaving extraordinary amount of data on the internet platforms so for the chinese internet giants as well as the new unicorns you know they have a huge amount of data to to to work on for their ai developments the global tech competition is often mired in politics but ma believes u.s sanctions against chinese companies like huawei have produced an unexpected result and certainly you know while we took a hit and its smartphone market share has decreased dramatically uh the flip side of that story is that you know that market share did not go to uh the u.s brands did not go to the go to the apple's market here instead the chinese brands filled that void you know especially xiaomi we look at the top five smartphone brands globally three chinese brands including xiaomi are there technological advances in ultra-fast quantum computing could someday help us better predict everything from the weather to financial markets china recently claimed to have developed the world's fastest quantum computer well china's got the fastest quantum computer but it's for one use case so the quantum side the u.s is ahead you've got companies like honeywell and ibm and google and microsoft running into this quantum space and it's not just the fact that it's a performance issue they've got the ecosystem of developers they've got the ecosystems of folks that are building products and solutions on top that's much more powerful another powerful race shaping up is over electric vehicles while the u.s is out in front in some areas it could be losing ground in others the united states are pretty much a leader when it comes to the renaissance of the ev the electric vehicle and namely because of one company tesla you know that started this 10 years ago and has been pretty successful at this however if you look at different regions in the world in particular china and western europe you see those two regions really picking up speed and particularly also adoption rates of electric vehicles and the united states is at a risk to kind of fall behind ev market expansion also depends on how easy it is for drivers to charge up some auto experts say in that area china is better positioned to succeed installing charging networks is expensive and it's not easy to find a centralized location so while ev companies continue to innovate government investment is also seen as being key in accelerating growth mark new cgtn palo alto california well let's bring in our panel out to weigh in on all of this joining me from beijing is andy mock he is a senior research fellow at the center for china and globalization also joining us from san francisco is re ma she is the creator and host of tech buzz china with us two from detroit is peter suchu he writes about technology and is a contributor to forbes magazine and also joining us from beijing is shindo shu he is a senior fellow at the pangol institution and he's the host of cgtn's dialogue weekend thank you to all of you for being with us and rumah let me start with you as we just heard in our report there both sides are claiming uh progress in this battle for technological supremacy uh but what is your view on the overall state of the china u.s technology competition that's taking place right now i would agree with a lot of the comments that have been made in particular earlier uh the presenter was saying how some of the uh sanctions right against chinese tech companies have inadvertently created a market for for chinese tech because previously they could rely on you know the the more advanced uh supply chain technologies from the united states but now having been slapped with sanctions now there's this fear that oh we need to have a self-reliance we need to have not uh industry-dependent supply chains we need to have an independent supply chain that we can rely on and this has in fact created more capital and more talent as people see more and more opportunities to to um you know make advancements in this space where the us was previously leading and china now needs has more of an existential crisis and needs to solve this problem of technological interdependency so ruba uh will you say then that these sanctions against a company like say huawei has backfired really because it's motivated chinese companies to develop their own technology well i would say it's a little early to say but it certainly has created the dynamic that i just explained where um you know again china is still behind in a lot of these technologies so it'll take years to catch up but the ecosystem is probably accelerating and at a pace that it previously could not accommodate andy mock one of the biggest developments we've had in technology in the last decade or so is electric vehicles and of course all the technology that's associated with electric vehicles they talk about navigation technology uh connectivity battery technology things like that china is the world's largest auto market um how well is china doing in this particular sector and where do you think it's going to go to from here well i think china is very well positioned uh to be a global leader in this field everything from key components like batteries uh which china is as a leader in to the end users so in the package we heard uh the importance of charging stations and i think one under appreciated factor is the role of regulation and in china we all know that if the central government makes a decision uh even down to the neighborhood level the decisions are implemented whereas in a place like the united states it may be actually impossible for the federal government to make a decision that is uniformly implemented across the country on a timely basis so i think this is one of the critical factors for the universal adoption of electric vehicles and of course once you have a system operating that gives you advantages in learning how to develop and further optimize it and i would go back also to uh ray's point here that um this was a tremendously galvanizing moment uh for china and the u.s sanctions i think truly backfired and created the sputnik moment uh for the chinese government and many chinese tech companies to say you know it'd be nice to have our own semiconductors but we also like inexpensive high-quality american ships from qualcomm from nvidia etc but now this these sanctions have really put this issue at the very top of the policy stack for china so i think the country is completely aligned just saying they have to do something about this and it really is to the detriment of major american tech companies and american competitiveness so andy that point on charging stations uh what that could mean for the united states of course is that you could make and manufacture uh electric vehicles but if you don't have that infrastructure in place and at this stage the country does not have enough of that infrastructure in place in fact there's quite a bit of money earmarked in the current bill sitting in congress to build out uh an infrastructure for electric vehicles but if you don't have that you're going to be held back aren't you absolutely and again this is where i think china excels at these systemic revolutionary type changes uh you know we all know the example of high-speed rail uh but we need to understand here too that the us fundamentally misread the technology revolution we go back to what president bill clinton said very famously that china trying to control the internet would be like nailing jello to the wall and not only did it turn out to be possible to nail gel into the wall but it turned out to be absolutely critical and china realized this uh through what is sometimes referred to as the great firewall and similarly what we're seeing today is china is not only advancing on the technology front but on the regulatory front as well so we're seeing uh cyber security law this year uh the data security law and personal information protection law uh the china is approaching this uh systematically and an integrated fashion i think this really is the best way to realize the fruits of technological innovation whether we're talking about ev ai quantum uh while avoiding the risk as well which in their very very significant risks as we've seen too peter you are in detroit which has traditionally been the home of the u.s automobile industry moto town as it used to be known but it's california-based tesla which has now taken the lead in the manufacture and sales of electric vehicles what's the view from detroit on the ev revolution that we're seeing right now well i don't think it's just detroit i think it's what we would call the flyovers for 18 years of my life i lived in new york city i spent a lot of time in california and i think what we see on both coasts in the country is how out of touch the coasts are with middle america which is where i am now all of my neighbors here in the detroit suburbs have big trucks this is what they want uh they want it for safety they want it for the trip to home depot they want it because it drives well in the winter time until we can see eevee trucks coming and i know ford has their f-150 filling that void until we can see trucks i think it's going to be a real hard sell outside of the coasts uh the same way that we're seeing kind of that hold up with self-driving cars self-driving cars are great in the bay area where weather is the same 365 a year but once you get into things like snow and ice and rain storms it doesn't work quite as well and this seems to be peter something of a close attachment that american drivers have to gas driven vehicles it's almost an emotional attachment uh they want gas-driven vehicles as you point out especially in in middle america how difficult is it going to be to persuade people to give up those gas driven vehicles and adopt electric vehicles right now we're seeing gas prices on the rise they fell to well i wouldn't say record levels but they fell to near record levels a year ago during the pandemic year and a half ago during the pandemic those prices have steadily been on the rise i saw a aaa report just this week michigan where i'm located has the highest gas prices in more than a decade so i think that's going to be the factor is how expensive it is to use those gas guzzling vehicles when we reach a tipping point and it's too expensive to fuel up your truck we might see a transition but again the infrastructure is going to be that issue as somebody who has literally driven coast to coast you know you can find a gas station in kansas you can find a gas station in iowa you know you run low on gas you're in a little bit of trouble on some places but you're going to find a gas station what do you do right now with electric vehicles where maybe you can't make it from pittsburgh to philadelphia you know let alone pittsburgh to phoenix shindo shu and of course whenever we have this kind of technology battle between china and the united states politics is not far behind in fact the united states has made it very clear that it will not tolerate china surpassing its uh goals in technology we heard that from president biden in fact in one of his first speeches since becoming president he said not on my watch so how does china view this and does it impact uh chinese tech goals in any way well uh you know for china it's really it has a big market remember back in like 10 15 years ago you know we read stories it's all about why the chinese can't innovate and nowadays people are afraid of like oh chinese innovation power so it's a lack of understanding i think it's also a lack of understanding about chinese politics about chinese uh you know how chinese view itself in terms of the global situation for example china does not have this to dominate the world uh it's really about take care itself you know do a much better job than yesterday that's a goal uh even when it comes to competition you know right now if you look at china it stresses very much about the renewable energy for example basically uh one-third almost one-third of this renewable energy patterns comes from china it produces it exports the largest i think in terms of wind turbines you know solar panels uh evs and batteries so china does not see that as a competition to beat the u.s china see that as a solution to solve its pollution issue to fight climate change uh that's very very important and you know when it comes to semiconductor it's a different issue because for a lot of chinese people don't realize that there's heavy reliance on semiconductor on the u.s technology for example or technology from netherlands but until the sanctions are imposed down far away and there's a wake up call you know we have to do something otherwise uh you know um basically you will do you know like a far away the high-end phone will be out of the market uh simply because of the cutting off of the technology or supply of the semiconductor products from the us now it's a wake-up call and then the governments the business and uh the public in general uh they are doing something okay to to you know improve our own technology in terms of producing a semiconductor that's uh probably the backfire we don't know you know where it will lead the tech wall just like in any kind of wall it's easy to start but it's difficult to manage you know to manage where it will lead the direction room let's look at the chinese smartphone industry 5g technology industry as well i mean if you look at the west apple and samsung are very popular in western countries but if you look at other parts of the world like africa or asia it's chinese brands which are selling uh in those countries as well what does the future hold for smartphone development in china well i think it's pretty clear that even since a couple years ago that the domestic market has basically reached saturation and uh you know all the smartphone makers have been actively seeking growth outside of china so india be you know in africa middle east being a very good markets uh and where chinese brands have done really well i think different from what uh i guess huawei actually being one of the exceptions is most of these other brands have been primarily been able to win through cheaper prices and been able to basically have their phones um you know be sold in in developing countries where people just don't have as deep of the pocketbooks that were that we have here in the west and i've asked for the future i think that if you i don't know about the smartphone um companies in particular but what i do know from talking to a lot of chinese tech companies early and late stage is that all of them are seeking to have a global presence right so i don't think that's going to stop whether or not that means you know they'll be actively trying to take away market share from even the high-end devices like apple and samsung i think that could happen but um i don't know what the what is exactly on the horizon andy mark of course this particular sector uh smartphone development smartphone manufacturing is fraught with all kinds of risks we saw that when the united states cut off semiconductor supplies to chinese companies huawei in particular um if we look at huawei for instance uh to what extent did it hurt the company and how are other smartphone companies doing well i think these sanctions absolutely hurt huawei because they were directly tailored to inflict as much damage on the company as possible because it is china's technological champion and i think a template for what china's tech future will look like meaning that of course china's manufacturing miracle was based on uh low-value ads labor-intensive products that were sold inexpensively but huawei was really the first company to invest significantly in r d develop its own technology and compete as a technology company so this really was very damaging to wale but on the other hand i think it also showed the resilience and just the uh toughness of bali to respond to do what it takes to keep going so i think that uh what we will see is it's not just huawei look at tick tock now uh doing as the first truly uh global chinese company uh on the consumer markets which figured out a way to reach global markets at scale so i think that the chinese tech advance is really unstoppable and that whatever the us is doing uh really either backfires or hurts itself much more than does china i'll throw in a quick example too uh just recently uh the pentagon's chief software officer resigned because he was so frustrated uh with the pace of uh innovation uh in the u.s military so again we see that there are systemic constraints on the us's ability to keep pace despite uh whatever the rhetoric we might hear from the white house or other parts of the us government peter let's move on to artificial intelligence or ai as it's known it's another area of very intense competition between these two countries in fact just as as we heard there from winston ma in that report at the beginning of the show uh the two countries are neck and neck but how far advanced is the united states ai uh industry right now well right now i would say that china stands as a full spectrum pure competitor of the united states in both commercial and national security applications for ai uh the united states has certainly gone all in on a number of sectors with artificial intelligence we're seeing it again with the self-driving cars i referenced before uh we're seeing the military applications i think the united states has the edge because the united states has the edge in software development right now but uh right now i could see china closing that gap very quickly andy mark how uh is china poised to use ai in the country um will this technology be used to improve people's lives certainly and i think that artificial intelligence the best way we can understand ai is that it's a general purpose technology like electricity so we think about pre-industrial uh pre-industrial revolution post-industrial revolution the impact that technology had on consumers lives having lights at home dramatically changed people's daily lives uh to industrial applications it enabled much more productivity from factories to the military and similarly we're seeing the same thing with artificial intelligence which is again i think why it is the nexus of competition between the us and china and here we also see china taking a strategic and comprehensive approach we've all heard that data is quote unquote the new oil meaning that it powers everything in ai which is true but another very important aspect of the competition is just computing performance um which we can think of as hardware and a recent report that was released by a chinese think tank affiliated with miit i just announced that china has something like 135 uh exa flops so meaning the ability to uh process 135 quintillion floating point operations per second so this is an enormous increase the us still leads in this area i think in total global computing power they're about 36 percent china's at 31 but if we break that down into basic computing smart computing and super computing capacity china's actually well in the lead in smart computing capacity so again i think the ability to make these systemic uh investments whether it's regulatory investments capital investments or investment in uh talent and manpower i think china's unique system of government's governance gives it some important advantages shindo xu looking at the competition between china and the united states in technology the united states has complained very often that it's not a level playing field that chinese companies receive subsidies from the chinese government um is that a fair criticism uh well you know every government say does subsidy uh to the certain you know technology certain industry if you look at the us it's more or less the same of course for the chinese system uh probably you see there's more is a supply and system uh at a certain level but uh it's a you know it's a combination problem you know you have a plumbing the factor you have this uh invisible hands of the market so um they com once the combines perfectly you will see there's a great development and in terms of speed in terms of the the you know innovation but it does not always work that way um but i i would not say as long as it works if you are pragmatic as long as it works for developing kind of to catch up in terms of technology what else can you do uh you cannot steal you cannot otherwise you can always copy and to do the follow-up um so you have to start somewhere uh i wouldn't say that's that's unfair in particular for developing country it's really but uh you know otherwise the developed world would say you know all our technologies is copy uh write it and the developing countries were always behind you know they can never catch up with us so subsidy is not really a bad thing in that sense okay remind another field that we hear a lot of talk about is quantum computing firstly uh for the uninitiated like myself and many others what is quantum computing and how does it impact our lives well quantum computing is a is a new form of computing that i think hasn't we haven't figured out exactly how it's going to be used in daily life it is primarily now in academic and research and it's it's a it's a step it's a it's a fundamentally new and different technology from the semiconductors that we're using today um it's entirely different technology i'm actually not the best person to talk about this but i think what everyone is hoping in you know the tech space is that this will represent the next stage of development where we're no longer because we're already um you know at the edge of moore's law i think people have heard about this you know the semiconductor companies um you know getting slower and slower in their advancements um in terms of how narrow they can make the channels on the chips uh and that this will open up a whole new type of computing power to to mankind andy mock where is this quantum computing competition right now well that's a very good question i think the answer is no one really knows because quantum is seen perhaps even more than a.i as a strategic technology from a national security military perspective and for this reason a lot a lot of the research that is done is classified and not publicized so i think it's hard to know but that being said uh there is a race on for this and my understanding of quantum is that classic computing is based on zeros and ones uh so bits and what quantum does it gives you many many more possibilities and as a result gives you a quantum leap in terms of the ability to process difficult problems some of the classic ones are nuclear explosions weather patterns the stock market etc so we think about things like what if through quantum computing we could accurately predict stock prices a week a month from now so these are the kinds of applications that are possible that i think make it so promising and so exciting but it's also threatening uh when we look at it in the context of a geopolitical rivalry okay and we have to leave it there thanks to all of you for being with us you've been watching the heat i'm arno thanks for being with us [Music] you

Channel: CGTN America

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Length: 27min 51sec (1671 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021